DVD Review: Battlestar Galactica: The Plan

I despair for non BSG fans who stumble upon this.Â Without detailed knowledge of the series, this is an incoherent mess.Â Even with detailed knowledge of the series and the frame story, it still lacks a plot.Â It’s a series of events that happen in a certain order, and that’s about it.Â It doesn’t end so much as stop.

I’m not really sure how to make sense of this, really.Â With the retcon of Cavil as the big bad, it’s quite clear that the creators had to do some retrofitting to make this story work.Â And it does answer many of the burning questions people had:Â Who was Caprica Six meeting with on Caprica?Â Why was there a Cavil with the resistance group on Caprica?Â How did Shelly Godfrey disappear?Â Why is Leoben so obsessed with Starbuck?

Also – what was the plan?
Not much it turns, out.Â It was Cavil’s plan, and really just one particular Cavil (so much for the “they” in “they have a plan”).Â There are implications that each model had their own plans (the number 4’s breeding ranch seems to be soemthing done outside Cavil’s domain, though with his knowledge).Â And I’ll spoil it:Â Cavil’s plan was to kill every last human, and when the final 5 awoke, to have them grovel at his feet and admit that humans were unworthy of love.

Not much of a plan, and it really only works if you ignore EVERYTHING ELSE THE CYLON FLEET EVER DID during the first two seasons of the show.Â This movie gets around that by making it appear that the human fleet’s location was totally unknown to the Cylons, and Father Cavil was running an underground insurgency on the fleet with the few models within the fleet.Â However, his stated goal is to utterly kill all the humans so that the final five can resurrect and admit Cavil was right.

Since in the series, there were a dozen or so times the Cylons could have wiped out the entire fleet (the Pegasus crew, you will recall, was suspicious of how the Cylon fleet kept hanging back, just out of range), and the whole attempt to make a human/Cylon hybrid doesn’t fit with this plan at all, this movie actually makes the series less coherent overall, despite the way it answers several small questions.Â Â Some of the smaller details now fit, but the overall picture is even less clear.

Also, be warned:Â There’s some gratuitous nudity (including male genitalia but mostly boobies) that will clearly be cut for broadcast.Â In fact, you can tell exactly where the cuts will be made, which makes the scenes doubly gratuitous.Â They add nothing to the movie other than to say “Look!Â We can show boobies on the DVD version!”

I prefer to believe that BG is like the Pentateuch, with different, somewhat contradictory sources combining to make a satisfying whole. Attempts to make it coherent are like a bad bit of literalist Christian apologetics.

I’ve lost all desire to see this. They had me convinced that “and they have a plan” was indicative of something besides “kill all humans.” Ron Moore painted himself into a corner rather than mapping out a plan. It was fun while it lasted.